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Sometimes he still looks so small to me...
***
Holding my breath, watching the election results.
*** President Obmama = awesome.
A week in the Life: Wednesday (on Friday)
In the morning, first thing, snow coated the ground like sugar. Then it melted, and a soft rain started to fal, rinsing the remaining orange and yellow leaves; making them fall in wet heaps to the dark ground.
Every day hinges around these simple things: dishes stacked in the cupboard, food prepared, then put away. Each day I try to succumb more gracefully to the essence of these tasks.
After work I put fresh paint in Bean's pallett and let him go to town. I love his abstract lines and the way color and shape become things after the fact, after the paint has been smeared across the page.
Bringing fresh water for paint, I have my camera with me and snap a photo. This is life documentary: catching the bubbles swirl in the glass and the water running down the drain.
Evening, before bed. A circle of lamplight in our blue bedroom.
A Week In The Life:: Monday
Morning blur. All of the pictures I took today have this blurry quality. Such an apt reflection of my Monday. Here, Bean giggles in the covers as I get dressed. He's such a big kid now--sleeping every night, all through the night, in his OWN bed. I still am marveling at this. It's such a big deal for him--the boy who is impervious to sleep.
A skeptical self portrait. From this angle I hardly look pregnant. Must take a side angle photo tomorrow so you can see how truly huge I am.
Work bag on the floor at the end of the day. The house is cold when I come home.
I curl up on the couch to check email and savor the quiet of ten minutes when no one needs me.
Dishes. Laundry. These small things. I try to give myself over to them, being wholly in them, letting all else but the moment slip away.
Bean lives his whole life in the moment...although he is beginning to get the concept of future. To him the future means one thing: toys he can ask for for Christmas this year. He's taken to marking with Xs all the toys he wants from every catalog that arrives at our door.
A Week In The Life:: Sunday
Drying my hair. Hating maternity clothes as much as I did last time. This is not a good start to the morning.
Breakfast = best part of the day. DH made biscuits (he makes the best.)
Yummy lemon curd to go with flakey, dreamy biscuits.
Then an insurmountable list of everything to do. I dropped the couch on my foot while moving it to vacuum. I started to sob. The rest of the day pretty much felt like a bruise. Thin skinned doesn't even describe it.
Everything feels on edge. Precarious. Fragile. Dramatic. Technicolor.
After Bean is asleep, I sit on the couch in the living room writing lesson plans and wondering where I'll find the energy and enthusiasm to face 22 second graders tomorrow. The house is quiet & clean. I lit a candle on the windowsill. The light falls in yellow flickering circles.
A Week In The Life:: Saturday
Morning light.
Shower.
Unmade bed.
Drying my hair.
Breakfast = broiled grapefruits w/brown sugar; croissants, soft boiled eggs; lattes.
Empty table.
Letting the geese out.
On the walk...
Inevitably the geese join us. Bean always bikes--in his bright yellow helmet with thunderbolts.
The frost has turned to dew.
Back inside, doing laundry I notice my mismatched polka dots.
Bean draws in the kitchen while us grownups whirl about the house tidying. Then we take a trip to town: lumber at Home Depot; lunch; a stop for bread; and a stop for some new sheets.
In the blink of an eye the light is already slanting towards twilight.
Bean twirls while I sit in the leaves soaking up the last rays of golden sun.
How I love weekends.
Am thinking of doing this all week. Inspired by Ali. All too often the fragments that make the mosaics of my days go unrecorded...
A perfect afternoon.
Mellow autumn sunlight. A blanket. Orange leaves getting stuck in our hair. A pomogrante to share. Giggles. Juice on our fingers. Delight.
Saturday ::
Went to sleep last night with the dizzy images of the Olympic opening ceremony.The awe-inspiring precision, the vastness, the almost eery unison of the performers left me feeling both wonder-filled and anxious. The little children, handing the Chinese flag over to the soldirers... shivers. Woke up to sun. The twelfth day of sun all summer. For real.
French toast and a iced latte. I may be turning a corner (though I feel queasy right now.) Then I finished painting my new studio space upstairs, before dinner with freinds downtown. Play in the fountain. Street artists. Good times.
Friday ::
* An iced decaf latte tasted good today. This is miraculous.
* Bought orchids for my new studio space (we're shuffeling rooms, repainting, etc.)
* My pants no longer fit, but I'm not really showing. In other words, I look chubby around my middle. So attractive. It's all about the bella band now.
* Am excited to watch the Olympics tonight. They always get me motivated to do sports and to take better care of myself. Ironically--last time I was watching the summer Olympics, Bean was in my tummy.
* Bean used the words "actually" and "absolutely" in the same sentence today. It made me giggle. Now he's digging gravel on the driveway with the geese looking on.
* I've decided all the little things matter. In a year from now I'll forget what being pregnant was like. For the next little while, I'll be focusing on minutia :) and perhaps starting to draw every day objects again. It's somehow very grounding to bring my attention back to the little things. To take notice of food, small moments, errands, conversations.
Thursday ::
More thunder. The kind that rips things. That takes your breath away. That follows the same jagged streak through the sky that the lightneing took.
Feeling slightly better today, but terrified that if I say so the horrible morning sickness gods will smite me down.
Watched the end of So You Think You Can Dance tonight, and every bone in my non-dancer body wishes I were a dancer. People tease me for loving the show--but they can only be people who haven't watched. Because it's not just entertainment, it's art. Some of the dance pieces tonight made my breath catch. Its one of the few things I'd do differently if I could do my life over again. I'd dance. Instead I grew up in a very quiet home without any music that even remotely had a beat (read: my parents only played Vivaldi) and hence I have zero rhythm. Yet watching dance makes my heart sing.
If you could do something differently--if you could do your life over again--what would you do?
Wednesday ::
I felt reasonable today, and as a result accomplished seven times what I have been typically accomplishing every day. As in: completed & turned in 2 manuscripts, finished an article, and completely set my classroom up. That last part took me almost the whole day. My back is rediculously sore from pushing metal desks and bookshelves around. I snagged to boys on custodial duty to move the really heavy stuff, but the rest I did myself. It's too hard to try and visualize classroom feng shui with two teenage boys gawking about.
While I was sorting books rainclouds gathered. Suddenly it was ominously black out my window. Then the rain came pelting down in sheets. The smell of ozone came through the open windows, and then a crack of thunder so close I jumped. On the way home I passed the tree the lightening had hit. A huge branch had cleaved off an old maple--and had wrapped itself entirely around an electrical line. One thing New England weather isn't is boring.
Also: Bean just went and got his shoes and then left the house with his guitar (an old beaten up acoustic guitar we've had around forever) saying "I'm leaving to go to a concert so I won't be able to go to bed tonight. The concert will be really really long and I'll be out really late."
I have absolutely no idea where he got that idea.
Back home. And the universe is colliding.
A whirlwind trip. Cafe con leche, late nights with friends, dancing, a fairy tale wedding, and a really long trip home. And then... everything else. Too much to tell here, yet. Suffice to say, changes are afoot.
Enjoy the pics. I will hereby commence regular posting. Missed you all.
glimmer
A fun weekend
New baby chicks & new bantam chickens from a neighbor (we named the rooster Guisseppe!)
A new bike for Bean.
New plants in the garden.
Sore muscles.
A night with just DH.
And only four three weeks left of school.
Weekend snapshots
(Bean took this one.)
The world has turned green. Less than a month left of school. The morning sun is waking me up, and I've been heading out to run more. Still not feeling totally in harmony with myself yet: still too much on my plate. But more days and more moments where the the orbit of things aligns with my own twirling self.
(Btw: The Cure was a wild, loud adventure that included getting lost when leaving Montreal--4o miles east, before we realized we were supposed to be going south. Oy. And the next day was a blur of tiredness.)
I am hoping to update here every day this week. I have a thing with perfection. I don't like writing here unless I have long moments to spend, delving into the deeper fabric of my thoughts. But I miss the daily practice. The flawed jotting of notes, of small moments, of daily life. When I first wrote here, I wrote all the time... but somehow I seem to have upped the standard on myself, and now I'm dragging my feet, feeling like if I can't post a brilliant post, I should'nt post anything at all. What is with that?
A post in pictures
It's suddenly warm here. Days perfect for drinking fizzy water and limes. Days for getting first sunburns, working in the garden. A week of vacation: to catch up on writing and sleep and time with my boys.
Bean and I spend every second outdoors in the afternoons, ambling through our meadows, taking stock of everything that is new and green and budding. He found these old baskets from last autumn's crysanthemums on the brush pile we're preparing to burn. Natraully, they offered endless entertainment.
Made the first batch of sun tea this week. The temperature has hit 80, and it's almost soporific. Just two weeks ago I was wearing down and socks, now I'm barefoot, my toes badly in need of a pedicure.
Writing, upstairs, alone in the house, I heard a thud. Unmistakable, reminding me of a childhood in the Rocky Mountains in a big-windowed cabin and my dad, holding stunned birds in his quiet palms. They always flew away, and compelled, I went downstairs and out the screen door looking. It was there, below the frong windows, wings spread wide, eyes closed. But I scooped it up gently, and held it. (My dad always said holding the birds helped them with the shock.) And eventually, he started to blink, and move about, then perched for a while on my thumb before flying off. A small blessing.
Wildflowers suddenly everywhere, and insects. I'm so damn grateful to be through with winter.
We hung Bean's first tree swing yesterday. So much nostalgia from childhood: my feet scraping the blue bowl of sky.
I found two today, the first of the year. I think of them as my writing talismans. Last year they brough so much: my writing group, Pam, a piece to be published this summer in the Sun. I've pressed them in my new Molskine.
He's just so beautiful. Yesterday in the garden he was stomping about. "I'm going to get the moon," he said, and then wandered off, gesturing that he'd gotten it and was holding it and bringing it back. "I brought you the moon, Mommy," he said, beaming.
Saturday mosaic
I’m in the dining room where the sun makes a pattern of rhombuses: bright and shadow across the table, and the woodstove fills the room with snug heat. The cat sleeps sprawled in the sun, while around the house wind moves incessantly, like restless spirits.
If I look hard, I can see the small buds on the trees growing rounder—as though the woods have been stained with a faint and hazy hue of red. And though it snowed yesterday, the ground is scabbed with mud and melt. Still, it’s cold out. Bitter in the wind the way it was in January, and my body has grown sluggish and soft from all the weeks indoors.
Today we ate toad-in-the-hole’s, ripe mangoes, yogurt and honey, hot coffee. Then packed snacks for a road trip to anywhere, but here. Spring fever has made us stir crazy, and we went looking for sugar makers and for barnyards with animals; for wind-whipped ridges and different sky lines; different windows to look out of, at the very least.
In a neighboring town we licked freshly poured maple candy off our fingers after pulling it from the snow in long golden ribbons, our cheeks chapped in the wind. People serve bread and butter pickles here, during sugaring, and home made doughnuts. Then we ducked indoors at a café where the floors were old pine in wide planks and the lattes were thick with microfoam and the coffee and foam was poured into a perfect bloom at the brim of every cup.
On the way back the sun made us squint. This American Life on the radio, Bean napping. We stopped at the carwash, and DH pointed the spray gun at the wheels, trying to dislodge a winter’s worth of frozen mud hugging up against the rotors. Small things, really, but a change of scenery; a couple hours to elope from our everyday where spring still hasn’t come and the laundry has yet to be done.
Sundown
Took my camera with me to the waterfront with the boys for a walk.
Got the skunk scent out of my cat with a natural enzyme spray: no tomato baths necessary!
Woke up today with a splitting headache. Now I have a fever. I can thank the kiddos at work for this one. I am so ready for warmer weather. For being able to throw open the windows. For anything other than ice storms. I so hoped to post something longer today--I was facinated by your comments about the idea of living 'perfectly' and wanted to write more about what I meant. About trying to live the way one always hopes one will---someday, although the doing of that in the moment seems to get put off for lesser (and greater) things.
But now that I'm sick all I really want to know is: what movie should I rent tonight?
It's alright
And yeah, the jealousy is still there. But I also know that I’d be heartbroken without this. Without the maples drenched in snow, the tiniest of new red buds just showing. Without this house that smells sweet with the heady aroma of brownies and hums with the rhythmic whir of the dishwasher. Without these boys: the big one and the small. I know this. I know there is an arc to everything, and that I’m on mine, and I’ll get there. And I know that this is my story: this juxtaposition of homestead and wanderlust. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
But thank you for your reminders. I needed them.
I'll be back by the weekend.